Chlamydia Warrior

The eye problems she observed in South India motivated this physician to devote her research career to understanding and vanquishing chlamydia.

“We are mostly bacteria,” said veteran Children’s Hospital Oakland researcher Deborah Dean, MD, MPH, pointing out that 90 percent of the cells in the human body are non-human.

“Our whole body is an ecosystem.”

With that image in her mind, it’s no wonder that after completing medical school—at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in Bronx, N.Y., and residency at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF)—Dr. Dean decided to do a postdoctoral fellowship in microbial pathogenesis at Stanford University as well as an Infectious Disease fellowship.